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The Golden Record: Far Beyond Our Galaxy The Golden Record: Far Beyond Our Galaxy August 18-October 7, 2018 ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art Artists Mickey Boyd, Catherine Clements, Matthew Flores, Keaton Fox, Mary Gordon, Gerald Habarth, Katlin Shae, Braden Skelton, Stephanie Sutton, T2R, Robby Toles, Momma Tried, and Harrison D. Walker Curators Curated by Brooke Leeton, Rebecca Brantley, Jon Vogt, and Paula Runyon About The Golden Record: Far Beyond Our Galaxy Forty-one years after the launch of NASA’s Voyager vessels, ATHICA celebrates the legacy of the Golden Record in an exhibition featuring work by regional and national artists. The Golden Record: Far Beyond Our Galaxy is the inaugural exhibition at ATHICA’s new location in the Leathers Building. In 1977, NASA launched two Voyager space probes designed to gather information about the planets in our solar system. Both were outfitted with a Golden Record, a gold-plated copper disk with a compilation of 103 sounds and 115 images from Earth selected by a committee led by scientist and educator Carl Sagan. The hope was that they might be discovered and decoded by alien life in the future. Both disks bear the sounds of the Brandenburg Concerto, greetings in 55 languages, thunder, crickets, a heartbeat, and “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, along with images of the minutiae of Earth, such as a woman in a supermarket, rush-hour traffic, and children standing around a globe. The Golden Record exhibition is inspired by the images and sounds seared into the records affixed to the Voyager spacecraft. The exhibition features works in all media, including sound, video, interactive media, found objects, and handmade materials. It reflects on the beautiful and daft hopefulness of the Golden Records going forth for 40,000 years to be almost near the next closest star. Support ATHICA is a community-supported, all-volunteer, 501(C)(3) organization. Our new home has been made possible through the support of our strategic partner, The James E. and Betty J. Huffer Foundation. Matthew Flores What is the relationship of the Golden Record to your work? Athens, GA Since the Golden Record will never again be viewed (in-person, at least) by a human, it is specifically tailored, both in its design and its purpose, for a non-human audience. This opens a very interesting gap in how we think about art and viewership more broadly—what does it mean to take ourselves out of an anthropological frame of reference and view the world in a different way? This is the impetus behind Art for Alternative Audiences 001 and 002. Is it Art For Alternative Audiences 001 & 002: Who’s a Good Boy? possible to create art designed and deployed specifically for a non-human audience? Can we ever take ourselves out of our established ways of viewing? Digital Video Even if, on the surface, these are works meant to hold meaning primarily for a dog, what meaning can it establish for a human? Art for Alternative Audiences Loop 001 and 002 establishes the fact that even non-anthropological art says something about viewing from the human experience. Even if it’s for the other, it’s NFS always about ourselves. Biography Matthew Flores is a multimedia artist and an MFA Candidate in Photography at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. His studio practice is rooted in strategies of misdirection and appropriation, and orbits around an interest in how the art viewing experience can be analogized with the format of jokes, performance, and the theatrical. His current research interests involve the function of anticipation and failure in aesthetics. He received his BA in Art History from the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri in 2015. matthew-flores.com Curator’s Thoughts Matthew Flores’ Art For Alternative Audiences 001 & 002: Who’s a Good Boy? consists of dual screens playing short videos. Art For Alternative Audiences 001 shows two women (or one woman digitally replicated), identical save for their blonde and brunette hair. In quick succession, they pose the same titular question in varying tones, emphasis, and intonation: “Who’s a good boy?” Playing on an adjacent screen, Art For Alternative Audiences 002 shows a toy shaped like a steak held in an outstretched hand. The disembodied hand squeezes the toy, emulating the melody of George Thorogood & The Destroyers’ “Bad to the Bone” (1982) and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956) in atonal, squeaky sounds. Flores’ installation is made for dogs. As such, it recalls the Golden Record’s effort to communicate with non-human viewers and listeners. Flores uses a common appeal to pets, the meaningless phrase “Who’s a good boy?,” and songs that employ dog tropes to imply a deceptive or irredeemable-but-desir- able partner (despite the fact that dogs are associated with fidelity in Western culture). Of course, neither the meaning of the phrase or the song is compre- hensible to canines, though the soothing—almost sensual—tone of the women’s voices and the toys’ sounds are meant to appeal to them. Seeking to communicate with extraterrestrial life in a manner akin to Flores’ effort to make art for dogs, the Golden Record nevertheless remains bound to language: fragments of human speech are part of the montage of Earth sounds, binary code records its images of Earth, and pictographic instructions ex- plain assemblage and use of the physical record. Both Flores and the creators of the Golden Record run into the ontological constraints of art and language: Can we meaningfully communicate with a non-human audience via art or other methods of representation? Seen through the lens of Flores’ droll videos, such an act is revealed as both transgressive and absurd. Rebecca Brantley Momma Tried What is the relationship of the Golden Record to your work? New Orleans, LA By creating work that is designed to be archived, Momma Tried aims to contribute to technoprogressive discourse about social constructivism and media ecology in the near and far future. Projects such as the Golden Record paved the way for us to imagine our potential future audience as being inclusive of both human and non-human individuals, expanding the scope and significance of archival practices to include voyages into the deep unknown. Goodbye Horses, Star Mall Digital photograph, augmented reality Biography Goodbye Horses (1:00), Star Mall (1:02) Momma Tried is a transmedia art project focused on photography, site-specific installations, emerging technology, and a print periodical by the same name. $400 each Rooted in constructivism and the confrontation of cooperative fictions, much of their work asks: “How does imagination and popular media shape reality?” and “How does art program the future?” Momma Tried magazine is stocked in locations that include the Tate Modern in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, MoMA PS1 in New York, and Closing Ceremony in Shanghai, and the artworks of Momma Tried have been exhibited internationally, including the CICA Museum, South Korea; Think Tank Gallery, Los Angeles; Cooper Union, New York, and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Momma Tried is the collaboration of Theo Eliezer and Micah Learned. Augmented reality app: programsynthesis.net Momma Tried website: www.mommatriedmagazine.com Curator’s Thoughts Momma Tried’s transmedial works Goodbye Horses and Star Mall assume the point of view of an artificially intelligent being, traversing digital landscapes comprised of two-dimensional imagery. In Goodbye Horses, the viewer is taken on a journey through the desert, with one of the songs chosen for the Gold- en Record, Blind Willie Johnson’s mournful tune “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” (1927), as the soundtrack. This song connects viewers with the strange juxtapositions between the analog (the strum of an acoustic guitar) and the digital (the glitch-induced appearance of a phone booth). But perhaps more fundamentally, Johnson’s blues guitar and yearning hum also recall the human attraction to music, and are a haunting reminder of the musician’s biography. Johnson only recorded a handful of songs in his lifetime and died living in the ruins of his burned-down home. Yet, as captured on the Golden Record, his music triumphs, positioned to outlast us all as an enduring reminder of human creativity. Brooke Leeton Stephanie Sutton What is the relationship of the Golden Record to your work? Athens, GA Included on the Voyager’s Golden Record was the image Demonstration of Licking, Eating, and Drinking, illustrating the physicality of human eating. My iteration of the feeding performance, remixed as video, is seen from a perspective over my shoulder. An ice cream cone, a grilled cheese sandwich, and an entire pitcher of water are fondly looked at and played with as I eat them from start to finish. How does observation look under the pressure of spatial Demonstration of Licking, Eating, and Drinking distance and time? In this work, real time is obscured with dropped frames marking its inevitable data loss, resembling a glitching strobe light or blinking Multi-Channel HD Video eye. My desire to be seen is an interstellar impulse reflected in astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s motivation behind his Golden Record passion project: where to 4:58 find us, how we do things, and what we look like. $710 Biography Stephanie Sutton’s work utilizes photography, video installation, sculpture, and performance to probe transformative notions of discipline and pleasure. Employing herself as subject, she borrows from conventions of ritual and labor to embody ideas of self-control and complicate assumptions of the fat body. She received her MFA from the University of Georgia in 2017. stephanie-sutton.com Curator’s Thoughts Stephanie Sutton’s work Demonstration of Licking, Eating, and Drinking revises the iconic photograph of these biological performances from the Golden Record.
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